Gamal al-Banna died yesterday, at 92. The progressive Islamic thinker was the younger brother of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He took a markedly different direction from his more famous sibling, writing books such as "My Coptic Siblings;" "The Muslim Woman, Liberated by the Quran and Enchained by the Fuqaha';" and "A Refutation of the Call to Punish Apostasy."

On the several occasions when I visited him in his office in Cairo -- the repository of a dense library with many rare old books, which he dearly loved -- he was funny, gracious and daring, the rare Islamic scholar with the guts to roundly dismiss Salafis as examples of "the outmost ignorance" and to tease: "The only way they can go back to the early days of Islam is if they can produce another Prophet Muhammad, another Abu Bakr."

In our last interview, on the pledges of contemporary Islamist groups to "apply Sharia," he argued that the Sunnah (the enormous collection of reported sayings and doings of the Prophet, on which much Islamic jurisprudence is based) are largely unreliable; that correctly interpreted the Koran would almost never lead to the application of the hudud (the infamous corporal punishments such as the cutting of hands); and that "another, better word of Sharia is justice [...] If a society implements freedom and justice, it can implement Sharia."

I was looking forward to more conversations with him. After the jump, an excellent obituary and overview of his work from the Arab-West Report.

as a liberal thinker because he voiced disparate opinions from those of the more

traditional-thinking Muslims. But, in a meeting in 2009 with Dutch journalist Eildert Mulder

about the origin of Islam, it was clear he accepted the critique on the historicity of the hadith, but

rejected the textual critique by European revisionist scholars on the text of the Qur’an. Thus, where

liberal European theologians would accept a textual critique on the Bible, the liberalism of Jamāl al-

Bannā did not extend far enough that he would accept a similar analysis of the Qur’anic text. He described the text in the discussion with Mulder as a great symphony that one cannot take apart in order to analyze individual aspects.

Most meetings with al-Bannā, including the meeting with Mulder, took place in his library in

his home. Here he felt most at home between his collection of thousands of books. Though printed in Dutch, as a good bibliophile he took Mulder’s book on the sources of Islam and added it to his

impressive collection.

In 2006, al-Bannā published a book on his Coptic brethren. He showed great sympathy for

Coptic Christians in Egypt, but was also critical of Church hierarchy for being authoritarian and

politicizing. I introduced al-Banna to Ayad Mossad, a Dutch Copt who was then the chairman of the Stichting Arab-West Foundation, which was followed by Mossad’s book review.

Around this period he also wrote his comment about CIDT in an Egyptian newspaper. He then

issues and works with interns from mainly Christian countries, but has always aimed to remain

religiously neutral.

Al-Banna spoke with respect about his brother Hassan (1906-1949), who became known as the

founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. In meetings he stated that his brother had started in Sufi

circles and only later entered politics. Al-Banna also believed that if his brother would not have been

assassinated in 1949, he probably could have played a role in preventing the radicalization that

later occurred.

These experiences with al-Banna were characteristic of his individualism. He was an original thinker, not afraid to be divert from mainstream beliefs, such as a controversial claim a few years ago stating that it was permitted to smoke during Ramadan. He was not willing to compromise on what he believed to be true himself. Jamāl al-Bannā has often been presented as a scholar and an

academic, but he was not and never claimed to be. The work that I was able to see was often not well researched. He was well-read, but lacked the scrutiny of an academic.

Jamāl al-Bannā was not only an ardent writer and speaker on religious and political subjects, but also active in society. In the early 1950’s, al-Bannā joined the Egyptian labor movement and wrote about syndicate-related issues for almost half a century.

In the summer of 2009, I introduced two AWR interns, Ben Connery and Rémi Drouin, students

of Arabic at the University of Oxford, to al-Banna, which resulted in a lengthy study about his work and beliefs. I later presented their excellent study for publication in MIDEO of the Dominican Oriental Institute in Cairo.

Some need to be highlighted here: Watani interviewed Jamāl al-Bannā in 2008 about his views concerning the Church, his opinion that religions do not contradict each other, and his explanations for the growing extremism in Egyptian society.

Ursula Lindsey is the managing editor of the Arabist blog. She writes about culture, education and politics in the Arab world. She lived in Cairo from 2002 to 2013 and got her start at the ground-breaking independent magazine Cairo Times. She was the culture editor of Cairo magazine in 2005-2006 and served as special projects editor at the independent news site Mada Masr in 2013-2014. She is the Chronicle of Higher Education's Middle East correspondent. She contributes to the BBC-PRI radio program The World, and has written for Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, Bookforum and the blog of the London Review of Books.